Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 hits Netflix on 20 October, and there is still a fifth character in the dark

The site CD Projekt Red has put up for the show holds five character files and only four of them have a face. The fifth is a silhouette buried under digital noise with two words underneath: coming soon. It is the most telling detail in the whole announcement.

The headline, though, is the date: Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 premieres on Netflix on 20 October, with a new trailer that went up overnight. It runs to ten episodes set in the world of Cyberpunk 2077, with an entirely new cast and not one survivor from the first season. CD Projekt Red describes it as "a raw, human story of revenge and redemption", which is exactly what you would expect to read.

The fact that it is self-contained is not a small footnote either, because it settles whether this was going to be a second season or a separate story, and the answer CD Projekt Red gives is the latter: a series you can watch without having seen the first one, though anyone who did already knows how these things tend to end in Night City.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 — Official Trailer

Who is making it this time

The most interesting change sits behind the camera. Kai Ikarashi directs, and on the first season he directed nothing, he storyboarded episode 6, Girl on Fire, probably the chapter more people remember than any other. Going from laying out one episode to running all ten episodes is a considerable promotion, and Trigger does not hand those out at random. That promotion tells me more about what kind of show this will be than the premiere date does.

The story is credited to Bartosz Sztybor and Masahiko Otsuka. The first comes from comics: Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams, which he wrote, took the 2023 Hugo for Best Graphic Story. Otsuka co-founded Trigger and already wrote episodes of the first season. Character designs are by Kanno Ichigo.

That said, Hiroyuki Imaishi, who directed the first season, is not here. Nor is there a word about Akira Yamaoka, whose soundtrack was, in part, responsible for how well the show landed. Not mentioning him does not mean he is gone, but as of today he is not confirmed.

Four with names and one in the shadows

The four with files are Weak, a veteran edgerunner they used to call "King" who now lives in the shadow of what he was; D, a Snake Nation netrunner hunting the killer who wiped out his clan; Roman Carax, a young cinephile in a city that traded film for braindance; and Talia, raised in corpo towers and hardened afterwards inside Maelstrom.

The official site gives them blood types and birthdays, which is the kind of detail you only bother publishing when you want people attached before the thing even airs. Here are the four files in full, with their Japanese voice cast.

And then there is the gap. There is a fifth character with no name, no voice, no birthday, and not even a face we can put to them.

Why this matters more to CD Projekt than to Netflix

The first season landed on 13 September 2022 and, twelve days later, Cyberpunk 2077 hit 136,724 concurrent players on Steam, more than seven times its August daily high. Axios reported it at the time and it remains the best gauge we have of what an anime can do for a video game: a title released almost two years earlier, carrying one of the worst launches of the decade on its back, was back in the conversation because of ten episodes of animation.

The finishing touch came in March 2023, when Edgerunners won Anime of the Year at the Crunchyroll Anime Awards. It is not common for a show commissioned to promote a video game to end up taking that.

Now the same play runs again, this time from a studio building the next Cyberpunk. The difference is that there is no game to rescue, only one to set up, which is why 20 October matters as much in Warsaw as it does in Los Gatos. Rockstar is testing something similar with its Netflix deal for GTA VI.

What is still missing

Things are still open: the fifth file, the episode titles, whether Yamaoka returns and whether Netflix drops all ten at once or drip-feeds them, which with this show is not a trivial question. I will bet dinner on that covered file being revealed before September is out, because nobody leaves a gap like that open for two months. There is no word on release times either.

20 October settles it. In the meantime, if adaptations are your thing, the other big one on our slate this year is the Resident Evil film.